Durrer Center (Amsterdam) adopts OpenSpecimen

The Durrer Center for cardiovascular research (Durrer Center), part of the Netherlands Heart Institute, is a national multidisciplinary collaboration of academic research institutes in the field of cardiology, genetics and biostatistics partaking in cardiovascular genetic and epidemiological studies and associated biobanks.

Durrer Center provides expertise, infrastructure and services for collecting, comparing, harmonizing and merging results from individual cardiovascular genetic studies. By combining these different cohorts and making them centrally accessible and visible it creates the possibility to deliver more effective health care strategies aimed at cardiovascular disease prevention, and at tailoring medicines and other treatment regimens to individuals, families and communities.
Since 2008, the Durrer Center has supported 32 independent research projects for samples and/or data storage.

We (Durrer Center) were looking for a good alternative Biobank Information Management System (BIMS). One of our requirements was a BIMS that is web-based and has an opensource solution because lots of our projects include a few samples over a longer period in many different hospitals. Within the CTMM-TraIT (www.ctmm-trait.nl) project several BIMS were evaluated. Catissue was also evaluated and did not receive very good reviews. after Krishagni Solutions took over the development of Catissue, the CTMM-TraIT project team evaluated OpenSpecimen 2.x. After speaking with Sri at the BBMRI conference in Milan we concluded that OpenSpecimen is the BIMS we needed at the Durrer Center: a fast easy to use and user-friendly, good looking GUI with almost all the biobanking functionality we needed.

After evaluating and testing version 3.3 within the BBMRI-NL project, we adopted OpenSpecimen in our daily practices. Because we wanted to make use of the SDE and dashboard plugins we decided to adopt the Enterprise Edition.

If you would like to know more about how we work with OpenSpecimen at the Durrer Center, we would be more than happy to discuss this with you. Please sent an email to info@durrercenter.nl.